The Great West and The Agricultural Revolution 1865-1896

The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

• After the Civil War, the Great West was still relatively untamed,wild, full of Indians, bison, and wildlife, and sparsely populated by a few Mormons and Mexicans.

• As the White settlers began to populate the Great West, theIndians, caught in the middle, increasingly turned against each other, were infected with White man’s diseases, and stuck battling to hunt the few remaining bison that were still ranging around.

The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

– The Sioux, displaced by Chippewas from the their ancestral lands atthe headwaters of the Mississippi in the late 1700s, expanded at theexpense of the Crows, Kiowas, and Pawnees, and justified their actionsby reasoning that White men had done the same thing to them. • The Indians had become great

riders, hunters, and fighters ever since the Spanish had introduced the horse to them.

The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

• The federal government tried to pacify the Indians by signingtreaties at Fort Laramie in 1851 and Fort Atkinson in 1853 with the chiefs of the tribes. However, the U.S. failed to understand that such“tribes” and “chiefs” didn’t necessarily represent groups of people in Indian culture, and that in most cases,Native Americans didn’t recognize authorities outside of their families.

Making the Treaty of Fort Laramie

The Clash of Cultures on the Plains

• In the 1860s, the U.S. government intensified its efforts by herding Indians into still smaller and smaller reservations (like the Dakota Territory). – Indians were often promised that

they wouldn’t be botheredfurther after moving out of their ancestral lands, and often, Indianagents were corrupt and pawned off shoddy food and products to their own fellow Indians.

– White men often disregarded treaties, though, and frequently swindled the Indians.

The Clash of Cultures on the Plains• In frustration, many Native American

tribes fought back. A slew ofIndian vs. White skirmishes emerged between roughly 1864 to 1890 in theso-called “Indian Wars.” – After the Civil War, the U.S. Army’s

new mission became—go clear Indians out of the West for White settlers to move in.

– Many times though, the Indians were better equipped than thefederal troops sent to quell their revolts because arrows could befired more rapidly than a muzzle-loaded rifle. Invention of the Colt.45 revolver (six-shooter) and Winchester repeating rifle changed this.

– Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer (at Little Bighorn) all battled Indians.

1864 Chivington’s Massacre

• Chivington firstly had his men seize the Indians horses to prevent escape. The Indians, expecting protection, watched in surprise. The people gathered under the American flag fluttering above Black Kettle’s tipi, thinking this would afford them protection. Quickly, Black Kettle raised a white surrender flag on the same pole. But the soldiers ignored it and began shooting. They unloaded everything they had into the unfortunate villagers – rifle, pistol and cannon fire. The Indians ran in horror. But there was little place to hide. The soldiers herded the women and children into groups and murdered them in cold blood. They then performed outrageous depravities to their corpses. In one instance a six year old girl clutching a white flag was brought down in a hail of bullets – dead before she hit the ground. Babies brains were dashed out against trees. Bodies were scalped and ripped open with knives. Tobacco pouches were made out of men’s private parts.

Chivington’s Massacre• The final grisly toll was 98

women and children and 25 men killed. The soldiers lost 9 killed and 38 wounded. Much of their casualty rate was caused by ‘friendly fire.’ The 3rd Colorado rode back to Denver with over 100 dripping scalps, which were proudly displayed in a local theatre – the bloody emblems of the most disgraceful attack ever undertaken by the United States Government.

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1866 Fetterman’s Massacre• Severe mutilations were committed

upon the bodies of nearly all the soldiers and were widely publicized by the newspapers. The only body left untouched was that of a young bugler, Adolph Metzler, who was believed to have fought several Indians with just his bugle.

• His body was left untouched and covered in a buffalo robe by the Indians. The reason for this remains unknown, although it may have been a tribute to his bravery. The battle, named the Battle of the Hundred Slain by the Indians and the Fetterman Massacre by the soldiers, was the worst army defeat on the Great Plains until the disaster on the Little Big Horn ten years later.

1876 Battle of Little Bighorn• Colonel Custer found gold

in the Black Hills of South Dakota (sacred Sioux land), and hordes of gold-seekers invaded the Siouxreservation in search of gold, causing Sitting Bull and the Sioux to goon the warpath, completely decimating Custer’s Seventh Calvary at Little Big Horn in the process.

General George Custer

Battle of Little Bighorn• In late 1875, Sioux and Cheyenne Indians defiantly left their reservations,

outraged over the continued intrusions of whites into their sacred lands in the Black Hills. They gathered in Montana with the great warrior Sitting Bull to fight for their lands. The following spring, two victories over the U.S. Cavalry emboldened them to fight on in the summer of 1876.

Battle of Little Bighorn• To force the large Indian army back to the reservations, the Army

dispatched three columns to attack in coordinated fashion, one of which contained Lt. Colonel George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. Spotting the Sioux village about fifteen miles away along the Rosebud River on June 25, Custer also found a nearby group of about forty warriors. Ignoring orders to wait, he decided to attack before they could alert the main party. He did not realize that the number of warriors in the village numbered three times his strength.

Battle of Little Bighorn• Dividing his forces in three, Custer sent troops under Captain Frederick

Benteen to prevent their escape through the upper valley of the Little Bighorn River. Major Marcus Reno was to pursue the group, cross the river, and charge the Indian village in a coordinated effort with the remaining troops under his command. He hoped to strike the Indian encampment at the northern and southern ends simultaneously, but made this decision without knowing what kind of terrain he would have to cross before making his assault. He belatedly discovered that he would have to negotiate a maze of bluffs and ravines to attack.

Captain Benteenand Major Reno

Battle of Little Bighorn• Reno's squadron of 175 soldiers attacked the southern end. Quickly

finding themselves in a desperate battle with little hope of any relief, Reno halted his charging men before they could be trapped, fought for ten minutes in dismounted formation, and then withdrew into the timber and brush along the river. When that position proved indefensible, they retreated uphill to the bluffs east of the river, pursued hotly by a mix of Cheyenne and Sioux.

Battle of Little Bighorn• Just as they finished driving the soldiers out, the Indians found roughly

210 of Custer's men coming towards the other end of the village, taking the pressure off of Reno's men. Cheyenne and Hunkpapa Sioux together crossed the river and slammed into the advancing soldiers, forcing them back to a long high ridge to the north. Meanwhile, another force, largely Oglala Sioux under Crazy Horse's command, swiftly moved downstream and then doubled back in a sweeping arc, enveloping Custer and his men in a pincer move. They began pouring in gunfire and arrows.

Crazy Horse

Battle of Little Bighorn• As the Indians closed in, Custer ordered his men to shoot their

horses and stack the carcasses to form a wall, but they provided little protection against bullets. In less than an hour, Custer and his men were killed in the worst American military disaster ever. After another day's fighting, Reno and Benteen's now united forces escaped when the Indians broke off the fight. They had learned that the other two columns of soldiers were coming towards them, so they fled.

Battle of Little Bighorn• After the battle, the Indians came through and stripped the bodies and mutilated

all the uniformed soldiers, believing that the soul of a mutilated body would be forced to walk the earth for all eternity and could not ascend to heaven. Inexplicably, they stripped Custer's body and cleaned it, but did not scalp or mutilate it. He had been wearing buckskins instead of a blue uniform, and some believe that the Indians thought he was not a soldier and so, thinking he was an innocent, left him alone. Because his hair was cut short for battle, others think that he did not have enough hair to allow for a very good scalping. Immediately after the battle, the myth emerged that they left him alone out of respect for his fighting ability, but few participating Indians knew who he was to have been so respectful. To this day, no one knows the real reason.

Battle of Little Bighorn• Little Bighorn was the pinnacle of the Indians' power. They had achieved

their greatest victory yet, but soon their tenuous union fell apart in the face of the white onslaught. Outraged over the death of a popular Civil War hero on the eve of the Centennial, the nation demanded and received harsh retribution. The Black Hills dispute was quickly settled by redrawing the boundary lines, placing the Black Hills outside the reservation and open to white settlement. Within a year, the Sioux nation was defeated and broken. "Custer's Last Stand" was their last stand as well.

“My heart is sick and sad from where the sun now sets I will fight no more forever”

• The Nez Percé Indians also revolted when gold seekers made the government shrink their reservation by 90%, and after a tortuousbattle, Chief Joseph finally surrendered his band after a long trek across the Continental Divide toward Canada. He buried his hatchet and gave his famous speech saying, “From where the sun now stands Iwill fight no more forever.”

Subduing Geronimo

• The most difficult to subdue were the Apache tribes of Arizona andNew Mexico, led by Geronimo, but even they finally surrendered afterbeing pushed to Mexico, and afterwards, they became successful farmers.

The Ghost Dance Religion

• Often, zealous White missionaries would force Indians to convert,and in 1884, they helped urge the government to outlaw the sacred SunDance, called the Ghost Dance by Whites. It was a festival that Whitesthought was the war-drum beating.

Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge

Battle of Wounded Knee• At the Battle of Wounded

Knee, the “Ghost Dance” was brutally stamped out by U.S. troops, who killed women and children aswell. This battle marks the end of the Indian Wars as by then the Indians were all either on reservations or dead.

Bellowing Herds of Bison

• In the early days, tens of millions of bison dotted the Americanprairie, and by the end of the Civil War, there were still 15 millionbuffalo grazing, but it was the eruption of the railroad that reallystarted the buffalo massacre. – Many people killed buffalo for their

meat, their skins, or theirtongues, but many people either killed the bison for sport or killedthem, took only one small part of their bodies (like the tongue) andjust left the rest of the carcass to rot.

• By 1885, fewer than 1,000 buffalo were left, and the species was indanger of extinction. Those left were mostly in Yellowstone NationalPark.

Losing a way of Life

• The Indians were subdued due to (1) the railroad, which cut through the heart of the West, (2) the White man’s diseases, (3) theextermination of the buffalo, (4) wars, and (5) the loss of their landto White settlement.

1887 Dawes Severalty Act• The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887

dissolved the legal entities of alltribes, but if the Indians behaved the way Whites wanted them to behave(become farmers on reservations), they could receive full U.S.citizenship in 25 years (full citizenship to all Indians was granted in1924).

• The Dawes Act struck forcefully at the Indians, and by 1900 theyhad lost half the land than they had held 20 years before. This planwould outline U.S. policy toward Indians until the 1934 IndianReorganization Act which helped the Indian population rebound and grow.

American Indian Territorial Losses

A Century of Dishonor

• Sympathy for the Indians finally materialized in the 1880s, helpedin part by Helen Hunt Jackson’s book A Century of Dishonor and her novel Ramona.

Mining Precious Minerals• Gold was discovered in California in

the late 1840s, and in 1858, the same happened at Pike’s Peak in Colorado.“Fifty-Niners” flocked out there, but within a month ortwo, the gold had run out.

• The Comstock Lode in Nevada was discovered in 1859, and a fantastic amount of gold and silver worth more than $340 million was mined.

• The amassing of precious metals financed the government, helped build railroads and increased the tensions with Native Americans

• “Free Silver” became a political issue for farmers , Populists and finally the Progressive Party

Ghost Towns

• Smaller “lucky strikes” also drew money-lovers to Montana, Idaho, and other western states. Anarchy in these outposts seemed to rule, but in the end, what was left were usually ghost towns.

Suffrage out West

• Women found new rights in these Western lands however, gainingsuffrage in Wyoming (1869) (the first place for women to vote), Utah (1870), Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896).

Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive• As cities back east boomed in the

latter half of the nineteenth century, the demand for food and meat increased sharply.

• The problem of marketing meat profitably to the public market andcities was solved by the new transcontinental railroads. Cattle couldnow be shipped to the stockyards under “beef barons” likethe Swifts and Armours. – The meat-packaging industry thus

sprang up.

Philip Swift

GustavoArmour

Long Drive• The “Long Drive”

emerged to become a spectacular feederof the slaughterhouses, as Texas cowboys herded cattle across desolateland to railroad terminals in Kansas. – Dodge City, Abilene,

Ogallala, and Cheyenne became favorite stopovers. • At Dodge City Wyatt Earp

and in Abilene, Marshal James B. Hickok maintained order.

Barbed Wire• The railroads made the cattle

herding business prosper, but it also destroyed it, for the railroads also brought sheepherders andhomesteaders who built barbed-wire, invented by Samuel Glidden, fences that erased the open-range days of the long cattle drives. – Also, blizzards in the winter of

1886-87 left dazed cattle starving and freezing.

• Breeders learned to fence their ranches and to organize (i.e. the Wyoming Stock-Growers’ Association).

The Cowboy• The legends of the cowboys

were made here at this time and live on in American lore.

1862 Homestead Act• The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed

folks to get as much as 160 acres of land in return for living on it for five years, improving it, andpaying a nominal fee of about $30.00. Or, it allowed folks to get land after only six month’s residence for $1.25 an acre.

• However, fraud was spawned by the Homestead Act, since almost ten times as much land ended up in the hands of land-grabbing promotersthan in the hands of real farmers.

1862 Homestead Act• This act led half a million

families to buy land and settle out West, but it often turned out to be a cruel hoax because in the dry Great Plains, 160 acres was rarely enough for a family to earn a livingand survive. And often, families were forced to give up theirhomesteads before the five years were up, since droughts, bad land, and lack of necessities forced them out.

Taming the West• Railroads such as the Northern Pacific

helped develop theagricultural West, a place where, after the tough, horse-trodden landshad been plowed and watered, proved to be surprisingly fertile.

• To counteract the lack of water (and a six year drought in the1880s), farmers developed the technique of “dry farming,”or using shallow cultivation methods to plant and farm, but over time,this method created a finely pulverized surface soil that contributed to the notorious “Dust Bowl” several decades later.

Taming The West– A Russian species of wheat

—tough and resistant todrought—was brought in and grew all over the Great Plains, while other plants were chosen in favor of corn.

– Huge federally financed irrigation projects soon caused the “Great American Desert” to bloom, and dams that tamed the Missouri and Columbia Rivers helped water the land.

The Far West Comes of Age

• The Great West experienced a population surge, as many people moved onto the frontier.

• New states like Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming were admitted into the Union. – In Oklahoma, the U.S. government

made available land that hadformerly belonged to the Native Americans, and thousands of“Sooners” jumped the boundary line and illegally went intoOklahoma, often forcing U.S. troops to evict them.

– On April 22, 1889, Oklahoma was legally opened, and 18 years later, in 1907, Oklahoma became the “Sooner State.”

Frontier Thesis in American History• In 1890, for the first time,

the U.S. census announced that a frontier was no longer discernible.

• The “closing” of the frontier inspired the Frederick Jackson Turner Thesis, which stated that America needed a frontier.

The Fading Frontier• The “safety valve theory” stated

that the frontier waslike a safety valve for folks who, when it became too crowded in their area, could simply pack up and leave, moving West.

• Still, free acreage did lure a host of immigrant farmers to theWest—farmers that probably wouldn’t have come to the Westhad the land not been cheap—and the lure of the West may have led to city employers raising wages to keep workers in the cities.

The Farm Becomes A Factory • New inventions in farming, such as a

steam engine that could pull a plow, seeder, or harrow, the new twine binder, and the combined reaper-thresher sped up harvesting and lowered the number of people needed to farm.

• Farmers were now increasingly producing single “cash” crops, since they could then concentrate their efforts, make profits, and buy manufactured goods from mail order companies, such as the Aaron Montgomery Ward catalogue (first sent in 1872) or from Sears.

The Farm Becomes A Factory

• Farmers had to borrow

against their land at high rates, pay to ship products on railroads and buy manufactured goods that were had high tariffs on them

• Farmers, though, were inclined to blame banks and railroads for their losses rather than their own shortcomings.

Deflation Dooms the Debtor

• In the 1880s, when world markets rebounded, produced more crops, and forced prices down, the farmers in America were the ones that foundruin.

• Paying back debts was especially difficult in this deflation-filled time during which there was simply not enough money to go around for everyone. Less money in circulation was called“contraction.”

Deflation Dooms the Debtor

• Farmers operated year after year on losses and lived off their fatas best they could, but thousands of homesteads fell to mortgages and foreclosures, and farm tenancy rather than farm ownership was increasing.

• The fall of the farmers in the late 1800s was similar to the fallof the South and its “King Cotton” during the Civil War:depending solely on one crop was good in good times but disastrousduring less prosperous times.

Unhappy Farmers

• In the late 1880s and early 1890s, droughts, grasshopper plagues,and searing heat waves made the toiling farmers miserable and poor.

• City, state, and federal governments added to this by gouging thefarmers, ripping them off by making them pay painful taxes when theycould least afford to do so.

• The railroads (by fixing freight prices), the middlemen (by takinghuge cuts in profits), and the various harvester, barbed wire, andfertilizer trusts all harassed farmers.

• In 1890, one half of the U.S. population still consisted of farmers, but they were hopelessly disorganized.

The Farmers Take Their Stand

• In the Greenback movement after the Civil War, agrarian unrest had flared forth as well.

• In 1867, the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, betterknown as The Grange, was founded by Oliver H. Kelley to improve thelives of isolated farmers through social, educational, and fraternalactivities. – Eventually, it spread to claim over

800,000 members in 1875, andthe Grange changed its goals to include the improvement of thecollective plight of the farmer.

The Farmers Take Their Stand– The Grangers found most success

in the upper Mississippi Valley,and eventually, they managed to get Congress to pass a set ofregulations known as the Granger Laws, but afterwards, their influencefaded.

• The Greenback Labor Party also attracted farmers, and in 1878, the Greenback Laborites polled over a million votes and elected 14 membersof Congress. – In 1880, the Greenbackers ran

General James B. Weaver, a Civil War general, but he only polled 3% of the popular vote.

Prelude to Populism

• The Farmers’ Alliance, founded in the late 1870s, was anothercoalition of farmers seeking to overthrow the chains from the banks andrailroads that bound them. – However, its programs only aimed

at those who owned their own land,thereby ignoring the tenant farmers, and it purposely excluded Blacks.

– The Alliance members agreed on the (1) nationalization ofrailroads, (2) the abolition of national banks, (3) a graduated incometax, and (4) a new federal sub-treasury for farmers.

Prelude to Populism

• Populists were led by Ignatius Donnelly from Minnesota and Mary Elizabeth Lease, both of whom spoke eloquently and attacked those thathurt farmers (banks, railroads, etc.).

• The Alliance was still not to be brushed aside, and in the comingdecade, they would combine into a new People’s Party (AKA, thePopulist Party) to launch a new attack on the northeastern citadels ofpower.

Coxey’s Army and the Pullman Strike

• The Panic of 1893 fueled the passion of the Populists. Many disgruntled unemployed fled to D.C. calling for change. – Most famous of these people

was “General” Jacob Coxey.“Coxey’s Army” marched on Washington with scores offollowers and many newspaper reporters. They called for: • relieving unemployment by an

inflationary government public works program.

• an issuance of $500 million in legal tender notes.

– The march fizzled out when they were arrested for walking on the grass.

The Pullman Strike• The Pullman Strike in Chicago, led

by Eugene Debs, was more dramatic. – Debs helped organize the workers

of the Pullman Palace Car Company.

– The company was hit hard by the depression and cut wages by about 1/3.

– Workers struck, sometimes violently.

– U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney called in federal troops tobreak up the strike. His rationale: the strike was interfering with thetransit of U.S. mail.

– Debs went to prison for 6 months and turned into the leading Socialist in America.

1896 McKinley versus Bryan

– The leading Republican candidate in 1896 was William McKinley, arespectable and friendly former Civil War major who had served manyyears in Congress representing his native Ohio.

– McKinley was the making of another Ohioan, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, whofinancially and politically supported the candidate through hispolitical years.

– McKinley was a conservative in business, preferring to leavesthings alone, and his platform was for the gold standard, even thoughhe personally was not. • His platform also called for a gold-silver

bimetallism—provided that all the other nations in the world didthe same, which was not bound to happen.

Golden McKinley and Silver Bryan

– The Democrats were in disarray and unable to come up with a candidate, until William Jennings Bryan, the “Boy Orator of thePlatte,” came to their rescue.

– At the 1896 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Bryan delivered a movingly passionate speech in favor of free silver. In this“Cross of Gold Speech” he created a sensation and won the nomination for the Democratic ticket the next day.

1896 McKinley versus Bryan• The Democratic ticket

called for unlimited coinage of silver withthe ratio of 16 silver ounces worth as much as one ounce of gold.

• Democrats who would not stand for this left the party.

– Some Democrats charged that they’d stolen the Populist ideas,and during the Election of 1896, it was essentially the“Demo-Pop” party.

1896 Presidential election

1896 Presidential election results• McKinley won decisively,

getting 271 electoral votes, mostly fromthe populous East and upper Midwest, as opposed to Bryan’s 176, mostly from the South and the West.

• This election was perhaps the most important since the elections involving Abraham Lincoln, for it was the first to seemingly pit theprivileged against the underprivileged, and it resulted in a victoryfor big business and big cities.

• Thus, the Election of 1896 could be called the “gold vs.silver” election. And, put to the vote, it was clear then thatAmericans were going with gold.

• Also in the election, the Middle Class preserved their comfortableway of life while the Republicans seized control of the White House of16 more years.

• Marc Hanna was McKinley’s campaign manager

1897-1901 William McKinley as President

• When McKinley took office in 1897, he was calm and conservative, working well with his party and avoiding major confrontations.

• The Dingley Tariff Bill was passed to replace the Wilson-Gorman lawand raise more revenue, raising the tariff level to whopping 46.5percent.

• Gold Standard Act of 1900 called for redeeming paper money in gold

• Gold Bugs…backers of the Gold Standard (eastern businessmen)